Military Skills + Education = Success
A degree plus the intangibles learned in the military will make you irresistible to employers.
by Shane Christopher

At some point, you will leave the military and start your life’s work outside the service.  While that proposition strikes fear in most of us, it shouldn’t.  The intangibles you learned and lived in the military, combined with the appropriate education, will make you a hot commodity in the civilian job market.

You’ve heard it dozens of times. Check out the military skills translator on myriad Web sites that profess to convert your MOS or rating into a civilian related job.  That may be a decent resource as background. But by no means should you limit your civilian job opportunities to the choices that a military skills translator spits out.

Intangibility Matters Most
The military teaches you how to build a team, how to lead and how to construct and execute a plan. These intangibles represent your most valuable job skills because they’re the most difficult and expensive to teach.  Like most service members, you take such intangibles for granted.  You discount their value. You just naturally complete tasks asked of you, assume that everybody shows up for work on time, and think nothing of sacrificing self for the team. After you’ve spent 24 months or 24 years living those guiding principles, you internalize them. They define you.

From a corporate perspective, finding employees with leadership, teamwork and loyalty skills is difficult because people without a common military experience come from such varied backgrounds. Some learned similar skills from their parents. Some learned them in school or college. Some learned them playing team sports. Some never learned them at all.  Ultimately, few possess the depth and experience of the ingrained intangibles that the military teaches you every day.

Cintas can teach you how to sell uniforms. GE can train you in the finer points of Black Belt. Companies can teach you the specifics of their jobs. But it’s very expensive to teach intangibles.  Those intangible skills alone make you incredibly attractive to civilian employers.

Those intangible skills, combined with the appropriate education, make you irresistible to civilian employers.

Don’t Just Change Uniforms
You all know military counterparts who left the service and moved into a similar job in the private sector. If that works for you, great; but don’t do so out of necessity.  In most cases, you chose your military job, or had one chosen for you, when you were very young. Upon reflection, in your 30s and 40s you can look back and say that your career aspirations then differed greatly from your career aspirations now.

Separating from the military presents an ideal opportunity to reevaluate those career aspirations by taking personal desires, family needs and new experiences into account. And the military has given us the breadth of worldly experience to know what you do best.  Determine what you like to do, and figure out how to make someone pay you for it.

Education is the Bonus
Get formal education in the field that interests you.  Combined with your mastery of intangible skills, this will give you the best chance of success in your chosen field.  Formal education reduces the investment a company will need in order to make you “job-ready.”  It also demonstrates to potential employers a proven aptitude in that field.

You’re not an MOS with a pulse. You are a professional armed with exceptional intangible skills that enhance any company wise enough to hire you.  Cinch the job by polishing yourself with appropriate education, and watch your post-military career prospects take off.